The death of ultra hiend audio

I am not sure I can describe what the "ultra high end" means. I have seen systems not in shows but in brick-and-mortar stores that approach seven figures. I suspect those are sold to very few for undisclosed amounts while those products are halos meant to light the way for buyers to more affordable gear made by the same maker or sold by the same dealer. Other stuff is nearly purely bespoke, custom cabinets, drivers sourced at auction, built by specialized craftsmen who duplicate nearly every step in the manufacture of an original many decades out of production for the very rarefied group of fans/buyers who may travel to other parts of  the world just to hear a special setup. There is only so much of a market for those things and the market is expressed by the costly development of new materials and products and the equally costly need for roadshows arranged to draw the interested.  Then there is the other high-end market, disparaged by some as appealing to "lifestyle" buyers, which is to say people with money who have expectations that high priced gear be made so it can be compatible with well-furnished living spaces and sound good. Usually that excludes vintage technologies and favors makers that consider good design and engineering that delivers performance without imposing on living space, so B&O, Linn, Dutch&Dutch, Grimm, Kii and others find buyers among whose not-unreasonable needs they meet. 

How many people were buying premium Marantz tube preamps in the day, or high-end turntables or Tandberg reel-to-reel decks? Not very many. Most people who might have chosen to buy a better sound system might have bought what my aunts each bought, a KLH Model 20, an all-in-one TT-receiver (AM and FM, germanium transistors--"solid state")  and those were seen as not-inexpensive systems for people who liked recorded music. There wasn’t a market for stratospheric gear, it didn’t exist. The ultra high-end as we are referring to is a phenomenon of the past  30 or so years.

Consumers have moved on. Financial pressures in the costs of ordinary things, attractions of portable audio, wireless audio technologies, audio in cars, laptops that can host whole high-definition collections ready to stream to a BT speaker or wireless home system, the disappearance of the recorded  "album". Who is meeting these consumers? Smartphone makers, web content distributors like Spotify and Tidal, Amazon and Apple, Chi-Fi developers that deliver inexpensive and decent-quality components that make buying a sound system an attractive and low-risk proposition. Producers of gear at nosebleed prices almost nobody can afford? Not so much.

@chenry I concur and have nothing to add. Excellent post. Thank you!

I actually think when you invest in the very best you forget who keeps you in business: it’s the average Joe that is your Bread & Butter. Look at Verity audio, why did they need a million dollar speaker? Investing that much in a their Monsalvat speaker had to bankrupt them. I bet they didn’t even sell 3 pairs if even that.

In my 'main' sound system, I have components from:

• United States (Schiit Audio -- DAC and monoblock amps)
• Canada (Bryson -- preamplifier)
• South Korea (HiFi Rose network transport)
• England (B&W 803D speakers)

They're all companies that are doing fine, and none of them go for the ultra high-end, except maybe for B&W with the very top of their line.

My own feeling is that ultra high-end audio is kind of like ultra high-end cars; not very many people buy supercars or the like. 

But a lot of people buy mid-Lexus cars, and I think a lot of folks buy at the mid-price for audio, as I have done. My most expensive items were the speakers. (I bought floor models at a stereo store in San Francisco that was going out of business and saved some money.)

The trick here, to me, is that my good system (which cost about the same as a Toyota Camry), sounds a million miles better than anything I could have had earlier in life, when it was record players and maybe a cassette player later on. And my current system is also flexible, running Roon with access to Tidal, able to stream in three other rooms of my house. 

So the overall audio market looks pretty good to me, but the ultra-high end may always be something of a glamorous invalid. As has been said a number of times here, only the very few can afford those. And whether they're *that* much better is questionable at best. 

I built my first home on the side while working a full time job and built or helped build a few since. When you consider the amount of labor, materials and hoops to jump through it takes to build a nice house, it bothers me not at all, that someone can’t stay in business building and trying to sell audio equipment for hundreds of thousands of dollars. When I see cables and cords selling for thousands of dollars, and think how ridiculous, I’m reminded that not long ago someone taped a banana to a wall, called it art and someone bought it for two million dollars. So whatever  you can get away with I guess, but some of us still live in the real world.